Friday, January 13, 2012

In which you are given more unsolicited advice on relationships from atop my soapbox

Moving forward from this post, there are there are other and far scarier things in relationships than
someone not being your everything. Take parents.

Nothing is scarier than
being with someone whose parents are irrational about you, and the
person you're with dismisses it. 'No, they just need time to get used to
you.' 'No, they can't understand what a girlfriend is; they'll be fine
once we're married.' (Yes, personal experience. BBot's father used to
leave the house when I entered. His mother used to harangue me with
'generalized' theories about love and marriage, unsubtly hinting that I
was bad for her son and it would never work. Heh, guess she was right
eh?)

Don't get me wrong--lots of people are hard to deal with and always
will be. The problem to me is when the partner is like no my parents
are FINE. No. Not okay. You have to accept that your parents are at
least a little nuts, and acknowledge that they could cause problems.
This is the only way I can honestly believe that you're on my side. My
mum can be scary as hell, mainly cos she will take your trip as if
she were your friend, and is rather merciless about it--totally not
aunty behaviour and thus nothing any desi boy is prepared for. I know
this. I tell her to behave. I deflect the teasing when I can.And I warn
them to expect it and show no fear, as it were.

Then what about when the person you're with displays behaviour that you
can't like. You try, but it doesn't work. You get hurt. You talk about
it, they promise to fix it. The whole week they are good. Or say you
broke up with them, and they want you back. New rules are laid down and
they are following them. But somehow you can't trust them, and you
wonder if you're being unfair. I've done this with BBot so many
times--berate myself for not trusting him to follow through on the
promise of better behaviour, even though I know he hasn't in the past.
Don't do it. Don't resent the person, but until they have proven that
they are truly in
the past don't forget what they did to hurt you. Forgive, but don't
forget, because you
learned something, you had to recover from what they did; you have to
heal yourself and learn to trust them again--why should you
let it happen again? You'd be stupid if you weren't even a little
wary!

But somehow women are expected to just let things go, in a way men aren't.Oh he's just a guy. And guys act like they're naughty rascals and you should just slap their wrists and let it go.

I'm tempted to make statements like "women are always more grown up; we're less
fragile; we are more resilient. It's a sort of species trait, as it
were". I don't know how true this might be, but I can't help but think it has quite a strong element of truth to it. But then again, maybe I just keep only SIW in my life and ignore the other women because for my purposes of friendship I don't need such a huge pool, but when it comes to dating I gotta keep em all around. Either way, there are still less SIM then SIW that I encounter. But setting aside the argument about gender traits, the goal in a relationship should be balance--that sometimes you can be the kid
and he has to mollify, and vice versa, etc. Indian women, we often have this sort of ingrained tendency to just make things easy
for guys.